Arts Afield.

Tom And Aggie: Childhood Trauma, Creative Passion

December 10, 1995|By Richard Christiansen.

In the last few days, I've been working my way through the biographies of two 20th Century American artists, and I've been surprised to find how similar their stories are, despite the difference in their backgrounds.

The first book, "Tom," by Lyle Leverich, is the recently published first half of the projected two-volume authorized biography of Tennessee Williams. The second, to be released in January, is Carol Easton's "No Intermissions," the biography of Agnes de Mille.

Born into a privileged family and reared in comfortable surroundings in California, De Mille was light years away from the genteel shabbiness of Tom Williams' upbringing in St. Louis; but both the celebrated American choreographer and the great American playwright had deep, dark family problems that were to affect their future masterpieces in profound ways.

Williams and De Mille wrote eloquently of their darker sides in their own memoirs, but these two new biographies bring their personal demons into new and provocative light.

Williams' agony, and the source of much of his creative writing, was a family that contained a smothering mother (Edwina), an embittered father (Cornelius) who called his son "Miss Nancy" and a doomed, beloved sister (Rose). All of them were to become characters in his masterpiece, "The Glass Menagerie," but in the theater they were far more gentle versions of what they had been in real life.

Having access to Williams' private papers, Leverich was able to build a terrifying scenario of the descent into insanity that eventually led to a lobotomy on Rose. Here, for example, is an excerpt from a letter Edwina wrote to her father:

"I'm facing my biggest problem again. What to do with Rose! . . . As soon as she crossed the threshold I saw she was all off. . . . She began to rave as soon as she got inside. Cornelius is nervous at best and since this trouble with his ear he is worse, so he lost his temper, told her she was crazy and that he was going to put her in the State Asylum. He will do this too, if I don't do something else with her."

For his part, Williams wrote in his journal: "Tragedy. I write that word knowing full well the meaning of it. We have had no deaths in our family but slowly by degrees something was happening much uglier and more terrible than death. Now we are forced to see it, know it. The thought is an aching numbness--a horror!"

De Mille never went through that kind of trauma, but, as Easton points out, her artistry was forever shaped by the fact that her beloved father William left the family and divorced her mother, a woman who obsessively tried to dominate her daughter's life.

And this struggle, to win the love of a father who had abandoned her and who, she believed, did not appreciate her dancing, and at the same time to free herself from her overly protective mother, found direct expression in her choreography. The tomboyish cowgirl, a lonely outsider who pines for the chief wrangler in "Rodeo," is drawn straight from Agnes, as is Lizzie Borden, the spurned child whose father betrays her with a cold and cruel stepmother, in "Fall River Legend."

The patterns of these two lives do not suggest that all artists must have childhood torments. That would be just a little too close to Freudian parody. But they do echo the adage about "As the twig is bent. . . ." And they do confirm once again that, whether directly or indirectly expressed, all artists put themselves into the work they create.